Mediterranean Diet and Mediterranean Lifestyle

The Mediterranean diet, which includes olive oil and wine, may be a healthy diet, even though it obtains up to 40% of calories from fat. Not all researchers agree that this is a healthy diet. Lifestyle also may be a factor in the health of people living in the Mediterranean.

A Harvard University scientist arguing that a diet containing 35 to 40 percent of calories as fat--as much as 10 percent more than what health experts recommend--could be "very compatible with excellent health"? A member of the American Heart Association's Nutrition Committee saying it is possible to eat more fat than the Heart Association advises and still follows a heart-healthy eating plan? Are such things really happening?

Yes, even as Americans are being told to reduce their fat intake from 37 percent of calories to less than 30 percent in order to avoid the ravages of heart disease and various kinds of cancer, a handful of researchers believe it's possible to eat just as much fat as ever yet remain protected from the chronic diseases that plague so many Americans during the last 10 to 20 years of their lives. It's enough to make anyone struggling to stick to a low-fat diet break a pencil between his teeth.

The notion that how much fat one eats is not important for good health comes largely from research conducted some 35 to 40 years ago on the Greek island of Crete. Researchers found in the 1950s and early60s that while the farming community that populated the island took in close to 40 percent of calories as fat, mostly as olive (it is said that some men even drank a glass of olive oil in the morning), the rates of heart disease and various types of cancer there were among the lowest in the world, and the adult life expectancy was among the highest.

The residents of Crete in the 50s and 60s also drank much more wine than Americans do today--more than four times as much according to at least one estimate. And in southern Italy, where olive oil was also the principal dietary fat (total fat consumption hovered around 28 percent of calories rather than 35 to 40 percent), an estimated 14 times as much wine was drunk per person as in the present day United States--again, with lower rates of heart disease and cancer than in this country.

It certainly sounds like a diet many Americans would be more pleased to follow than the one that is currently recommended. After all, which would you rather eat, a U.S. Dietary Guidelines diet, with its "prim" instructions for choosing a diet low in fat and drinking alcoholic beverages in moderation if at all, or a Mediterranean diet that includes foods dripping with olive oil and a ready supply of wine?

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